Thursday, May 5, 2016

Taking stock...homeschool evaluation time

Our homeschool evaluator is coming on Friday. This naturally makes me reflective as I help Sam look back over our year and choose things he'd most like to show to her as part of the evaluation.

As he picks through his history notebook and slides drawings of Roman soldiers and diagrams of Egyptian pyramids into page protectors, I think about all the things we've done this year and type out a list of what he's studied: history, spelling, languages (Latin and Spanish), movie making, bread baking, astronomy, art, piano, music from the Baroque period, grammar, multiplication. It's all important and it sounds impressive to me when I list it out.

But there's the bigger life stuff: how not to overwater your seeds when you are an excited new gardener. How to use pi to determine how much gravel you need for your backyard fire pit. How to share a room with a toddler who loves you so much and messes up all your stuff. How to separate laundry so your white shirts won't turn grey. How to not buy that Playmobil guy you want with your allowance so that you can save up for the Playmobil dragon set you really want. How to persist through part of a book that's kind of boring so you can get to the good part that's coming. How to know when you've invested enough time in a book that's not for you and should just move on to a new one. How to respond to that retired NASA engineer who called you and your cousin out for running in the space center when we went on a field trip. How to channel your frustration when the parachute experiment doesn't work right the first eight times you try it (and you just want to cry and give up).

Learning is so much bigger than school.

Here, at the end of our third year of homeschooling, what I see is that homeschooling for us isn't really as much about "school" as I thought it would be. It's more about making space for the curiosity and love of learning that already exist here. It's fanning sparks into flame. It's giving the gift of time to let passions grow slowly and to explore them deeply. It's reading a lot of books, going outside to play and pretend to be characters from those books, and then coming back inside to read some more.

I didn't start out to homeschool, and I said it would be a year-to-year decision. I still feel like we have made the right choice for our family, but my reasons are slightly different now than when we started. When we began, I was mostly concerned about what Sam wouldn't get to address his unique needs in our public school.

Now, this year, the main thing I see is time.

Our time is our own, and still, I feel there's never enough of it. Every day feels full from start to finish with projects, ideas, crafts, tasks, talks, meals, games, and books. When I think about what it would cost in time to have Sam leave for hours every day to go to school, I think he can't afford it...and neither can I.

As parents and educators, we talk a lot about how the early years are the formative ones, the "window" in which we have the greatest opportunity to give our little ones a great start in life.

Hanging out every day with my now seven-and-a-half year old, I'm so grateful that the window is still open- that I still have the chance to spend my days with him, that my influence is still strong, that he can stretch his growing brain and his growing muscles here with us and that we can share in the process.

When the evaluator comes, she'll see his carefully-compiled portfolio of work, of course, but she'll also see him...a person who has grown and changed exponentially this year since she last talked with him. And despite the frustrations and the sometimes chaotic, always noisy environment here, seeing that progress strengthens my resolve to continue to do this work that's before me. He's blossoming. He's curious and passionate and interested and interesting. Yes, we'll still be homeschooling next year. What exactly that will look like depends on lots of different things...but the further down this path we go, the less "homeschool" looks like "school at home" for us...and the happier I am about that.